jeverett15's Reviews:

The Shining by Stephen King

I haven’t actually seen Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation of The Shining, but it’s a testament to that film’s iconic status that even I couldn’t help but notice how different the original novel is from the movie. Without trying to spoil anything, there’s no cascade of blood coming out of an elevator and no creepy set of ghost twins either. There is, however, one hell of a dynamite premise, for either a book or a movie. For the few of you who might need an introduction: Jack Torrance is a fired teacher and a formerly promising writer who, in desperation, accepts […]

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Every year I try to read a book or two about baseball during the long off-season. It feels a little more productive than looking out the window and waiting for spring. Jason Turbow’s Dynastic, Bombastic, Fantastic is a non-fiction account of the great Oakland A’s teams of the early-to-mid-seventies. For those of you who aren’t baseball obsessives, the A’s won three consecutive World Series, in 1972, ’73, and ’74. They had some all-time greats and All-Stars all over the diamond. Despite their advantages in talent and their many successes, the A’s were beset by constant in-fighting and never-ending controversy. The […]

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To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis

To Say Nothing of the Dog is not for those with short-attention spans. Though it eventually finds its way and becomes an absorbing, rollicking time travel story, the road there is bumpy and, even worse, frustratingly slow and irritating. For about 150 pages, almost a third of the book, Willis putters around with her narrative, allowing characters to waste time on sitcom-level miscommunications and incompetent decision-making. The book makes an impressive recovery, which explains and also justifies the high esteem it is held in among sci-fi fans and those who love time-travel stories. Ned Henry is a historian at a […]

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Chicago by David Mamet

David Mamet is best know as the playwright behind such award-winning plays as Glengarry Glen Ross, Speed-the-plow, and American Buffalo. Chicago is his fourth novel but his first in eighteen years. The winding plot follows newspaper reporter Mike Hodge as he attempts to solve a string of gang-related murders in the titular town during the 1920s. With help from his fellow reporter Clem Parlow, a black female madam named Peekaboo, and a host of colorful characters on both sides of the law, Hodge attempts to put together the pieces of a complex puzzle. When Jewish restaurateur Jackie Weiss is gunned […]

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Only Killers and Thieves by Paul Howarth

Only Killers and Thieves by Paul Howarth What if Cormac McCarthy was Australian and wrote accessible prose? The result might be quite a bit like Paul Howarth’s debut novel. Set largely in the Australian cattlelands of the 1880s, Only Killers and Thieves is a book about good and evil, innocence and experience, white and black, and the near impossibility of maintaining your ideals in a corrupted world. Tommy McBride is the younger son of a cattle rancher. Drought has rendered the family ranch nearly free of vegetation and left the cattle hungry and barely worth selling. The family has been […]

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The Far Side of the Dollar by Ross Macdonald

Grizzled ex-cop P.I. Lew Archer is called in to the principal’s office when a boarding school student runs away after less than a week in class. But this is no ordinary school. It’s something of a school for wayward boys, and the runaway in question had just apparently stolen his neighbor’s car and wrecked it. Archer sinks his teeth into the case when no one will give him a straight answer, not even the boy’s distraught parents. Ignoring orders to cease his investigation, Archer stumbles across a few leads stretching back twenty years to the end of World War II, […]

The Last Kind Words Saloon by Larry McMurtry

The Last Kind Words Saloon is a testament to how much you can get away with when you’re a famous novelist. The Last Kind Words Saloon purports to be a novel about Wyatt Earp, Doc Holiday and the road to their famous shootout in Tombstone, Arizona, but in truth it is barely a novel at all. With 60 short chapters in a novel under 200 pages long there is barely time for any plot to occur. McMurtry tries to dispel some myths of the Old West by depicting Wyatt not as the fabled lawman but as a frequently drunk layabout […]

Game 7, 1986 by Ron Darling

This is a book for a niche audience. Obviously you’d have to be a baseball fan to even have a passing interest, but on top of that you’d really need to be a Mets fan to care enough to read it. Not only that but you’d probably have to be old enough to remember the 1986 Mets or at least have a specific interest in that historic team. It would also help if you were given the book by your mom. For those of you who don’t know and are still reading this for some reason, Ron Darling was a […]